This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Apfelwein #5 was mixed on November 19th. (See the publish date? Regardless of when the article goes live, it’s backdated to the date of the event.)

We used cups instead of grams to figure out how to get our sugar levels right. Otherwise, AW #5 is noticeable for a single reason, besides being our fifth batch of Apfelwein (AW) or sixth batch of cider.

This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Apfelwein #5C, aka, should be hooch-tastic but will probably just take forever to ferment. I write this because AW #5C (I don’t know why I settled on the C nomenclature for the sixth gallon on normally 5-gallon batches) is only 1 gallon of apple juice but has an extra 1.5 cups of brown sugar added to it. Which gives it a very dark, almost molasses color.

Just like AW #5, we added Danstar Windsor yeast to ferment it down. And once again, we had no hydrometer to measure. Alas, alas, alas.

That being said, we’ll see how it goes.

The 1.5 cups of brown sugar gave the cider a very dark color. We couldn’t do measurements in metric because the scale was out of battery.

This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Just as Bryce and I wanted to break out of the box by fermenting Hawaii’s Own, so too did we want to break out of the box, and possibly ferment it, when we decided to take on White Grapefruit Juice.

Once again, we figured out how much sugar we needed to add to bring it up to the same sugar gramage that our ciders have. We added the sugar, pitched the yeast and put the fermentation lock on and off to the races it went.

We used Lalvin EC-1118. We have another half gallon that we’re waiting on fermenting until we start another cider batch and use an ale yeast, so we can save the few extra dollars on a new yeast packet.

Side by side of the White Grapefruit and Hawaii’s Own. Both are being fermented by Lalvin EC-1118.

This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Bryce and I decided that it was time to take some drastic action. Mainly, I’d picked up 16 carboys from a response to an ad on Craigslist and we wanted to start experimenting. For, we cannot become better brewers until we break out of our comfort zones, no?

No matter.

We figured out the needed extra sugar for one gallon of Hawaii’s Own (pictured below) to bring it up to the same sugar level of our ciders. Then, we poured in water and pitched the yeast (Lalvin EC-1118.)

This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

AW #3C was a first for us. We’d read that brown sugar gives a “cidery” taste to alcohol, so, we figured that we’d increase the sugar content of a cider, a 1 gallon batch, exclusively with brown sugar.

AC #3C and AW #3 were taken out and taste tested at the exact same time and 3C, aka the Brown Sugar Bomber, tasted completely different from its fraternal big brother. It tasted incredible sweet, which leads us to believe (in lieu of a hydrometer, which was broken when we were first trying to use it) that the yeast hasn’t finished going to town on the sugars. So, it may just need longer in the bottle, since we bottled it.

We’ll see.

We primed it, and that’s all. No priming sugar.

If you look down in tags and look for AW Batch #3c you’ll see the old posts for it.

This article was originally posted on Oct. 18, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Our raspberry experiments are proving to be wildly successful. Our first batch of raspberry racked cider, made with a wine yeast none-the-less, is all gone because it just tasted so damn delicious. It also made pretty pictures. We’re working on four gallons, but made with Nottingham Ale Yeast.

Raspberries were boiled (12 oz. of raspberries per 1 gallon) (Trader Joe’s had the best deal at $2.50 per 12 oz. bag) with 1 tablespoon of brown sugar and then put into the racked cider. We then let it sit for about two or three weeks before bottling.